News

Off the Wall for Game Gear (and PC Engine)

We are on a roll! After our previous set of releases for the 20th anniversary, I managed to get hold of another unreleased game.

Off the Wall for the Game Gear is an adaptation of the Atari arcade game, something between Breakout and Atari's Warlords, a multiplayer brick breaking game. The game was only released in the arcades, and this Game Gear version was ported by Teeny Weeny Games. This version appears to support 2 players via the Gear-to-Gear cable, but I haven't tried that yet. It's unfortunately lacking in the graphics development, and the developer decision to use 4x4 tiles for ease of deelopment makes for a very small playfield. Perhaps they could have managed to use 6x6 tiles?

I got hold of this 9 years after we first spotted the game in retro reviews, and 7 years after someone showed up with a prototype cartridge for it, which eventually got sold and went through other hands. Here it is today!

And...

We are going to break tradition here, because I also got hold of a PC Engine version of Off the Wall. This has been teased a few times over the years. first by Nekofan a long time ago, then more recently by Jun Amanai who programmed that port and apparently own some versions of it. Comparing the version I obtained with Jun's, it seems that Jun's version is more recent and complete. This PC Engine build here seems to be a work-in-progress debug version, where you can skip levels at the press of a button, and not all features have been implemented. Still a cool thing! The files are below.

Tomorrow March 27, 2017 will mark the 20th anniversary of the site once called "SMS Camp"! The site was founded with the intent of dumping and releasing Master System games. We somehow kept on doing that! We also grew as a small community of hobbyist, programmers, hackers, mappers, musicians. And we miraculously kept every forums posts intact. I hereby nominate us as the most persistent and resilient website ever. Thank you everyone (and our partners/friends/families for coping with us nerds!).

We are running the traditional yearly coding / music competition with the flexible deadline of March 27-ish (any timezone), so you still have time to put an all-nighter and take monday off if you want to submit your entry! Sometimes after that we should start to post entries in the Competitions.

In the meanwhile, I have a handful of new ROM dumps to share.

1. We've got David Robinson's Supreme Court for the Game Gear, which is an unreleased game. It was apparently developed in 1991 by Acme Interactive Inc along with the Megadrive/Genesis version, and somehow the Game Gear version never saw the light of the day/ I've acquired two prototype copies of this a long time ago and it eluded my dodgy dumping hardware and adapters for a long time. Charles McDonald was kind enough to build a new custom adapter for me and finally today I have managed to get a reliable dump for this.

Here's the catch: those specific cartridges were demo versions hardcoded with a stream of scripted inputs data. But the game appears to be quite full featured (near completion), so someone should look into it and try to disable the demo mode. Anyone? *EDIT* See comments for the patch.

2. We've got Street Battle for the Game Gear, also unreleased. This is however none other than another one of Innovation Tech attempt to bring Korean games to the US, and the game is basically Jang Pung II with a new title. That specific build appears to be closer to the Korean Master System release, where one of the character was modified and it is also 512 KB (which mostly redundant data) unlike the more common Game Gear incarnation.

3. Brace yourself, we've got an absurdly rare Taiwanese incarnation of Hudson Soft's classic Star Soldier / Yǔzhòu zhànshì (宇宙戰士) for the SG-1000 which no-one appears to know about. This is a DahJee release on a beautiful green cartridge and it requires their custom adapter (also absurdly rare) to extend the SG-1000 II RAM so that it can run those MSX-1 hacks.

4. We've got Konami's arcade-gardening-shooting game Pippols / Shénqí huāyuán (神奇花園) for the SG-1000, also using the Jumbo/DahJee adapter and also a port from Konami's prolific era of MSX releases. As with every Taiwanese release this was pretty tough to find and it was a surprise that it even existed.

5. We've got a Super Off Road Prototype for the Game Gear, borrowed from an anonymous benefactor. The ROM image appears diff as radically different from the final retail version, and the zip file is 2 kb smaller which is a probable indicator that there's probably unfinished things in this version, but I haven't investigated it further yet.

6. Finally we've got the US version of Battletoads for the Game Gear which is pretty much an unexciting 3-byte header variation of the Japanese/European version, which for completeness I hadn't a chance to obtain until 2014 and the sort went into my unsorted stash for a long time.

Phew, long time without any new releases. Let's get to the meat of this!

We have finally managed to get our hands on a copy of Sky Fighter (보라매 전사) for the Samsung Gam*Boy / Master System, a shooting game from 1990. The game was discussed in HG101 article on Clover Soft, showing a single screen from an advertisement. It was apparently released on both MSX and SMS, but up to this day the MSX version hasn't surfaced. This SMS dump of the game is the first version available on the internet. The vertical shooter is reminiscent of Aleste / Power Strike with weapon changes, stationary shooting bases. Even though it isn't as good as most official releases and has horrendous music, it is quite playable and has a place among the higher quality original Korean titles.

Our second dump today is Cave Dude for the Game Gear, an unreleased prototype among others Innovation Tech tried to get released on the Game Gear in the US. The game runs in Master Syste compatibility mode. Somehow it appears that a few of those Innovation Tech cartridges have been doing the round among collectors. The game was also developed in Korean and known as Toto World 3 there, and is also best known as a part of the Australian 4 Pak All Action compilation. Our new dump today is actually pretty much identical to the version in 4 Pak All Action but as extra copyright and other information that were blanked out for the compilation.

We're not done yet! We have got a Prototype of Action Fighter for the Master System, that we are labelling [v0] in contrast with the retail [v1] and [v2] versions. The prototype has yet to be studied for differences, but one interesting thing is that its High Score table contains names that were removed in the final release:

(on the left, the new prototype) (on the right, the retail version)

With so little known about the developers behind some of those early games, the presence of SETSUO, WAKIHARA, KAWAMURA, FIGHTER, HANEDA, KENJI may be of interest to game historians.

Wonder Boy III: The Dragon's Trap Remake & Monster Boy

Two unusual but exciting news! You may have heard them elsewhere or on our forum but we thought it'd be worth posting a proper front-page news blurb here.

(1)
Wonder Boy III: The Dragon's Trap is getting an official modern remake!.. created by none other than yours truly. I have opened a small studio with my friend Ben Fiquet in Paris and we started working on this project which got picked by a publisher (DotEmu) and we untangled the licensing to do it legally and release it.

The game will be for Consoles/PC at least and we haven't announced a release date yet.

(2)
Another Parisian game studio, Game Atelier, are creating a game called Monster Boy, which is designed like a spiritual and semi-official sequel to the Wonder Boy/Monster World series, which draws lots of inspiration and contents from The Dragon's Trap and Wonder Boy in Monster World.

The game will also be released on various Consoles/PC and is planned for release in 2016.

H.E.R.O. / Qīng fēng xiá (青蜂俠) for the Aaronix SG-1000 II. A variant of the previously released version which had a Chinese logo. This one has an English logo following a pattern where many games were released with both sort of logos. This is one of my favorite SG-1000 game, check it out. I have a personal bias as this is perhaps the first SG-1000 game I have played (back in 1988 in Cairo, SC-3000 and software were on sale there for some reason).

We also have not one, not two but three prototypes of E-SWAT for the Master System. Back when it proudly said on the title screen THE ULTIMATE FACTOR IN THE BATTLE AGAINST CRIME followed by a typo on the difficulty selection screen. I got hold of those a long time ago but they stayed unsorted for a while. One of the dump was kindly donated by Arnold. Paul has taken the time to figure out their ordering (read his notes). Any other notable differences?